Craft is a flexible, user-friendly CMS for creating custom digital experiences on the web and beyond.

In technical terms, it’s a self-hosted PHP application backed by a MySQL or Postgres database. Read more in the official documentation.

Psst! Looking for the Craft source code? Need to file a bug report or feature request? Check out craftcms/cms.

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📯 If you just heard about Craft: Take a feature tour on our website—then spin up a demo project to try it out for yourself.

👷‍♀️ If you are eager to start building: You’re in exactly the right place!

Getting Started

This repository is a bare-bones Composer “project”, intended for use with the composer create-project command. It contains only the folders and files absolutely required to run Craft.

Tip

Our tutorial covers this setup process in greater depth. If you get stuck, give it a once-over; if things still aren’t clicking, help is never far away in our community or via official support.

You can also find these instructions (and some other helpful tips) in the documentation.

The best way to spin up your first project is with DDEV, a cross-platform, Docker-based PHP development environment.

1. Install DDEV
2. Choose a folder for your project and move into it:

   cd /path/to/web/projects
   mkdir my-project
   cd my-project

3. Configure a new DDEV project, and install Craft:

   ddev config --project-type=craftcms --docroot=web
   
   # Use this package as a starting point:
   ddev composer create -y --no-scripts craftcms/craft
   
   # Run the Craft CMS installer (use all defaults):
   ddev craft install

4. Run ddev launch to open the project in your browser.

Craft’s control panel is located at /admin. The rest is up to you! Pick up where we left off in the tutorial, or dive right in on modeling your own content:

• 🗃️ Elements: Learn about Craft’s core content types, and how to customize them.
• 📐 Fields: Create precisely the data structure and authoring experience you need.
• ✏️ Templating: Start using your data in a totally custom front-end.

Resources

Craft comes with a ton of official and community resources.